Cloudways can use Cloudflare in different ways: Autonomous includes Cloudflare Enterprise capabilities, while Flexible can use Cloudflare options or your own Cloudflare account.
A CDN mainly helps cacheable delivery
Static assets and cacheable pages can be served closer to visitors, reducing origin work and latency. Dynamic checkout, logged-in dashboards and uncached API work still depend heavily on origin capacity.
Security is part of the edge layer
Cloudflare features can include WAF, rate limiting, DDoS mitigation and traffic controls. These complement—not replace—application updates, strong credentials and origin security.
Avoid double configuration
If Cloudflare Enterprise is already integrated through Cloudways, do not blindly layer a second Cloudflare setup on top. Know which account and ruleset is authoritative before changing DNS or cache behavior.
Decision takeaway
Use Cloudflare to improve edge delivery and traffic filtering, but size the origin for the uncached workload that still reaches PHP and the database.